Book Review: Managing Alone by Janet Baccarani & Jennifer Black + MORE Jul 29th

Before getting into my new long & short pick, I will be closing out 2 of the existing ones this morning. They both had fairly “extreme” returns last week when earnings came out for Facebook (good) and Expedia (bad). As of this morning, returns for the 2 trades are:
-Long Facebook (FB) & Short Blue Nile (NILE) +53,83%
-Long Expedia (EXPE) & Short Orbitz (OWW) -32,27%
Overall it was a decent week but obviously following the strong Facebook earnings, I was hoping for better. Oh well! Just to clarify, I will remain long Facebook. My bigger position is the long term speculative pick I made. The long & short picks that I do are shorter term in nature so I’ll take the gain on this one and perhaps buy it again soon. I thought about doing it again today but there’s a decent chance the stock will give back a bit after such strong gains.
Today, I am opening a new trade between two very unrelated stocks. I usually don’t go for such pairs but as you know, I’ve been very bullish about Apple and with the last earnings now behind us and many product launches in the next few months, I think the upside vs downside is very much in Apple’s favor…

CBC.caHBC to buy US retailer Saks; plans to open 7 full-line stores in CanadaCTV NewsTORONTO — Hudson's Bay Co. says it will open up to seven full-line Saks stores in Canada and about two dozen locations under a discount banner once it completes a US$2.9-billion friendly deal to acquire the U.S. luxury retailer. "We're going to move as …Breakfast at Tiffany's, lunch at Target, dinner at Saks: The retail warsGlobe and MailHudson's Bay to bring Saks to Canada in $2.9B takeoverCBC.caFed fears, commodities shares take TSX lowerReuters Canada680 News -News1130 -AFPall 142 news articles »

What are the financial consequences of death on those left behind? And what kind of actions should one take beforehand to make it easier on them? This book by two financial advisors who focus their practice on the widowed addresses such questions.The authors take a very informal approach. They present a series of vignettes, mini stories about situations, apparently taken from the experience of their practice, that give the book a very realistic feel. Each chapter is a story about what starts out as a happy couple … but death awaits. I found myself thinking “who’s gonna die this time?” as someone’s slight cough inevitably turns fatal or a horrible accident stalks a hunting trip. It’s easy and quick reading. Each vignette focuses on a few financial issues related to death – the last will and testament, life insurance, naming beneficiaries of accounts and policies, bank accounts in joint names, sharing knowledge between spouses of financial matters.Managing Alone serves as an introduction, an awareness-raising exercise, rather than a detailed how-to manual…

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It’s well known that the majority of actively managed mutual funds underperform comparable index funds over any period longer than a few years. In fact, that statement has become so uncontroversial that even mutual fund salespeople freely acknowledge it. But a recent white paper co-authored by Rick Ferri, A Case for Index Fund Portfolios, takes this idea a step further.
Academic studies of mutual funds go back to the 1960s, and the well-known SPIVA scorecards are updated twice a year. So there’s no shortage of data on individual funds. But investors don’t use mutual funds in isolation: they build portfolios of funds in several asset classes. And there has been surprisingly little research on the performance of actively managed portfolios compared with passive alternatives.
Ferri introduced this idea in The Power of Passive Investing in 2011, and I wrote about his findings when that book came out. Now Ferri and his co-author Alex C. Benke have improved the analysis using more robust data…